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The 33 infants and children that an American Christian group tried to smuggle out of quake-hit Haiti are now being reunited with their families. The children were to be taken across the border to the Dominican Republic where the well meaning missionaries planned to establish an orphanage. So, what went wrong? What flawed thinking led to this debacle?
Several years ago I moved into a Cambodian slum with my wife and began to get more involved in caring for the children who were being orphaned in our community. After a lot of research, mistakes and false starts we established a ministry that has now reached hundreds of orphans. In my postgraduate research I also interviewed hundreds of orphans and visited numerous orphan ministries, distilling my results and observations into a few key principles.
So, here are the top 10 things anyone should consider before embarking on any orphan ministry:
1. Poverty is never an excuse to take orphans out of their community.
Too often children are taken away from their communities and placed in orphanages because their families are too poor to take care of them. Poverty is never a good reason for a children to be taken away from their support network of family and friends in the community. Instead of using our money to build expensive orphanages, we should instead use our money to support grandmothers, aunts and local families to care for their own orphans. Income generation projects and small business loans can also be used to strengthen families so that children can stay with them.
2. If you want sustainability, keep children in their own communities.
From an economic perspective, according to Save the Children, the cost of supporting a child in an orphanage is about twelve times the cost of support in a community based care program. The high costs associated with residential care, coupled with the fact that most residential care facilities are now located in the developing world, mean that resources must be sourced from outside the country. This heavy dependency on major external funding is a cause for concern. The UN points out that, "orphanages for 14 million orphans simply cannot be built and sustained". A more sustainable solution is to strengthen communities to care for their own orphans.
3. Make community participation a priority.
Research suggests that when children choose where to live it is based on where they feel they will be loved and best taken care of, whereas parents and other adults prioritise economic factors in decision making. Sadly, seldom do adults consult children. I wonder if these Haitian children would have wanted to be taken away from their families. I wonder if they were even asked. Communities should be given the dignity of caring for their own orphans. This relates to what has been called the "iron rule" of community development, "Never do for someone what they can do for themselves."
4. Don't even think about building an orphanage.
Children taken out of their communities are raised in situations which do not properly prepare them for life as an adult. The difficulty arises because children in orphanages are subject to the routines, procedures and administrative needs of the institution, serving the needs of the home for order, efficiency and conformity. There is an almost complete loss of independence. This is in stark contrast to the normal patterns within a family home and causes serious problems when reintegration into society becomes necessary. In short, children in orphanages are deprived of the life skills that they would learn growing up in a family and find it hard to cope with life outside the institution. In other words, institutionalization stores up problems for society, which is ill-equipped to cope with an influx of young adults who have not been socialized in the community in which they will have to live.
5. Research shows orphanages have an overwhelmingly negative psychosocial impact on children.
The majority of the orphan studies conducted over the past decades show that residential care, the care of orphans in orphanages or children's homes, has a negative effect on the psychosocial development of children. For example, children in orphanages demonstrate a significantly increased level of social maladjustment, aggression, attention demanding behaviour, sleep disturbance, extremes of over-affection or repelling affection, social immaturity and tendency to depression.
6. Instead, strengthen the support network of the orphans.
In the community, children are able to stay together with their siblings (a tremendous source of solace and support) and maintain a sense of connectedness with their extended family, their neighbours, their childhood friends, their culture, their heritage and their land. Do what it takes to keep orphans in that support network and strengthen extended families.
7. Monitor for abuse.
Clearly abuse can and does occur in any situation. Biological parents and extended family are all potential abusers. However, is there anything inherently worse or more dangerous about abuse that occurs in residential care facilities such as orphanages and children's homes? I believe so. Few outsiders are aware or care what takes place in these facilities. As a result many situations of abuse in orphanages go unreported. Evidence suggests that children abused in institutions may have greater difficulty in reporting the abuse, escaping from the situation, or getting support from outsiders. Due to the child's utter dependence on the institution, the abuse may continue for a long time. Children with disabilities are especially vulnerable. Wherever children are living, ensure you have a child protection policy and a strategy for monitoring the welfare of the orphans in your care.
8. Celebrate and encourage the use of God-given community resources.
It is important to help communities recognize and mobilize their own God-given resources (rather than overwhelm and dis-empower them with our resources), and the greatest resource of a community is its people. By mobilizing community members (particularly Christians and local churches) to show practical compassion to orphans they incarnate the love of Christ. In Cambodia we have trained and mobilized hundreds of Christian youth to be Big Brothers and Sisters to one orphan each.
9. Consider the property rights of the orphans.
In a subsistence economy, children sent away from their village may lose their rights to their parents' land and other property as well. Work closely with families to secure property rights and add children into wills before parents die, if possible.
10. Read up on Attachment Theory.
In "The Urban Halo" I briefly introduce John Bowlby's "attachment theory" which offers a partial reason for the sad impacts of orphanage life on children, suggesting that many of these difficulties result from the lack of availability of appropriate, nurturing, stable "mother substitutes" in orphanages and children's homes. The theory explains why visitors to an orphanage are mobbed by touch-hungry children. By identifying potential "mother substitutes" in the community (grandmothers, aunts, foster mothers etc.) this deep human need for the nurture of an adult can be more effectively met.
In this case in Haiti, the children had not lost their parents. But even if they had lost their parents, why take them away from everyone else they know and love?
[Craig Greenfield is the International Coordinator of Servants to Asia's Urban Poor and author of "The Urban Halo: a story of hope for orphans of the poor". For more information on community-based care for orphans and alternatives to orphanages take a look at the book website: www.urbanhalo.org.]
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